Noise Punk Icon Alan Vega Refused To Go Gently Into That Good Night On His Final Album ‘IT’

Almost a year ago exactly, the legendary noise punk artist and Suicide front man Alan Vega died in his sleep after taking a fall and breaking his hip. He was 78 years old. Vega left behind a legacy of music that influenced some of the biggest names in the, including Henry Rollins and Bruce Springsteen to name a few. Unbeknownst to almost everyone beside a select few, he left behind something else too. In his last years, Vega worked hand in hand with his wife Liz Lamere to create one final album. He called it, IT and its available everywhere on Fader Records on July 14.

Though his health declined significantly in his final years, especially after suffering a stroke that made it somewhat difficult to communicate verbally in 2012, Vega kept up his habit of creating just for the sake of creating right up until the very end. “He wrote every night,” Lamere said, when I spoke to her over the phone recently. “It was a nightly ritual. It wasn’t, ‘Oh, I have to record an album and I have to come up with lyrics.’ He was just constantly writing.”

In addition to constantly creating words, Vega remained utterly fascinated and totally involved in chasing and creating new “soundtracks” as Lamere calls them. “He would kind of have an idea, ‘This would be Song A, Song B, Song C,’ whatever,” She said. “He would have maybe eight or nine tracks that would be part of a composition that would be that song. It wasn’t like we were randomly pulling tracks, although I have done that with a song. ‘Nike Soldier.’ I literally randomly pulled tracks to make the song.”